Abstract
Wetlands are the most threatened environments on Earth. In the last 40 years the remaining Mediterranean wetlands have halved, with their degradation and loss expected to continue, exacerbated by subsidence, coastal erosion, deterioration of water quality, and overexploitation of groundwater resources. Scholars who work in and with wetlands experience this loss firsthand, encountering practices and ways of life that are vanishing or persisting at the margins of hegemonic social and economic orders.
Wetland anthropology addresses such processes of loss by exploring forms of resistance and developing an integrated approach to the study of socioecological and multispecies relations that characterize these environments.
Bio
Paolo Gruppuso is an anthropologist researching water landscapes, nature conservation, and more-than-human socialities at the intersection of social anthropology and the environmental humanities. Gruppuso holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen (2016). His research explores wetland practices and imaginaries, as well as urban ecologies and Anthropocene landscapes across Europe. He currently holds a DFG Eigene Stelle research grant for the project “Rethinking Wetlands (ReWet): An Environmental Anthropology,” based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU-Munich).